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US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

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Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#361

Post by pyinstallwoes »

63 wrote: post #256

I guess I don't understand what the point is? A100s are extremely powerful and generally used for ML or mining, right? But mining is already illegal in China and if the PRC wants to do military AI, I'm sure they're capable of building their own super computer without A100s. This isn't banning weaponized ai. It just seems like a minor annoyance to a couple of China's bigger companies who will quickly produce alternati…

Your priors are wrong on military, ai, and capability with manufacturing. There is a reason there is only a couple fabs in the world.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#362

Post by gambiting »

DSingularity wrote: post #360

Funny. And when the Chinese steal whatever IP they want they will eventually produce their own chips. Then when they improve the designs they will produce them in bulk, sell them at a premium, and buy them at a discount. If the US wants to maintain its hegemonic hood over the world — it best not be relying on these kinds of strategies.

How would they produce them, exactly? A design is worth nothing if you don't have a single fab capable of making them.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#363

Post by pyinstallwoes »

bottlepalm wrote: post #10

Sign of a coming AI arms race? If the image generation market is getting too saturated, maybe OpenAI can sell something to the government. No one has deeper pockets.

Indeed it is in the past tense now unofficially, rather than completely covertly.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#364

Post by pyinstallwoes »

butterfly771 wrote: post #273
alphabetting wrote: post #72

To me this is a pretty clear message that the US will defend Taiwan with full force.

As a Chinese, what I want to say is that populism here has risen rapidly in recent years, the Thucydides trap has been fulfilled again, and a war is basically inevitable. is the United States determined to deal with this earth war? How much are you willing to pay to protect Taiwan?

"Protect Taiwan" isn't the core issue is it? It's the production of chips which is the rate of technological growth and mantel of "technological supremacy."

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#365

Post by ofrzeta »

Always celebrating the "free market" but suddenly it's not so free anymore. Ok, not so suddenly. They US even pressure manufacturers like ASML to not export their high-end machines to China. I wonder what kind of leverage they have.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/us_expands_efforts_to...

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#366

Post by g42gregory »

I am not sure what exactly the thought process is here? So NVIDA is losing Chinese market, probably for the foreseeable future. Chinese are one step away from figuring out this technology anyway, if not already. They will not trust us again. It makes them less dependent on us. Oh, and we still need their manufacturing because of the labor costs, environmental issues, regulations and now, energy costs. How would this work exactly? I know it has been done during the Cold War I, but the world looks very different today.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#367

Post by adrian_b »

ajross wrote: post #329
sudosysgen wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? Do you know why China stopped submitting any supercomputers to Top500 despite widespread reports of two exascale supercomputers coming online? And why would they prioritize commercial chip sales over national security projects? AMD and Google have already beat Nvidia at the ML accelerator hardware game in the past. Google TPUs have had the edge over Nvidia cards for a few years, and AMD spent almost a decad…

Your contention is that SMIC is successfully operating a high volume 7nm process... in secret? What potential incentive would they have to do that? This isn't a spy novel; if a company has a money factory they tell their investors about it!

Why they do this can be only guessed, but it is a fact that SMIC has made chips using a 7 nm FinFET CMOS process very similar to the TSMC 7 nm process.

This has been discovered by studying with an electron microscope some samples of ASICs made at SMIC for crypto mining.

This story has been reported in a large number of publications and it is possible to buy a detailed report with the result of the investigations about the secret 7 nm process of SMIC.

Because of the similarities with the TSMC process, and because it is known that SMIC has hired former TSMC employees, it is believed that SMIC might have copied various parts of the TSMC process, which could be a reason to not bragg about it.

However such copying is not as simple as non-specialists may believe. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing, and even if you have all the details about how a technological process is done in another plant, when using other equipment you will not be able to reproduce the results without a lot of tweaking and changes.

Having stolen information about how the competition does it is helpful and it can shorten a lot the development time, but it cannot replace the need for a team of competent engineers, able to develop such a process by themselves, even if in a longer time.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#368

Post by 1MachineElf »

LeonTheremin wrote: post #199
option wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn’t a better strategy be have china depend on those product but require a sorts of built-on remote control in them in case of a conflict.

Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman, told Reuters in a recent interview that high-end processors should have kill-switches. “Knowing where the chips go is probably a very good thing. You could for example, on every chip put in essentially a public private key pair, which authenticates it and allows it to work”. hxxps://www.reuters.com/technology/chip-challenge-keeping-western-semiconductors-out-russian-weapons-2…

Perhaps Google had this in mind as they embarked on their Intel Management Engine workaround, dubbed "NERF": https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-NERF-UEFI-Linux

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#370

Post by nomel »

sudosysgen wrote: post #322
nomel wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's generally accepted that this was a copy paste of the TSMC process. I think we'll have to wait to see if they can advance this, on their own. As the other person pointed out, a good indicator would be yield.

It's a copy past of the TSMC process because they were able to offer far higher higher salaries and attract TSMC talent. Given the reality that they have a lot of that talent and more each year and given the excellent track record of SMIC leadership, they will probably be able to advance on this, limited by the lithography machines they can procure. If their yield was abysmal, no one would be willing to buy the chips…

> limited by the lithography machines they can procure

I would consider that a profound hurdle to advancement.

Nvidia has already moved to 5nm (released later this year).

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